I'm John Batchel with my colleague Henry Sikolsky of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

We're looking at issues to do with nuclear weapons. One of the issues is always plutonium. Where is it? Who's got it? Who wants it? What are they doing with it?

Plutonium is poison, but it's also a ready-made bomb once you have the rest of the materials assembled.

The plutonium most concerning to us right now is in the U.S. arsenal. It's in the Russian arsenal.

It's in the Chinese arsenal, It's in the Chinese arsenal,

Pakistan's arsenal. That plutonium is the center of the bomb. That's what blows up.

It needs to be updated constantly, Henry teaches me. And you look at your arsenal always to make

sure it's not deteriorating.

Is that testing?

The reason this matters is that the President of the United States, most recently has said that the U.S.

needs to conduct nuclear weapons testing because our adversaries, Russia is named China, Pakistan, and North Korea are named, are testing.

What does testing mean? Henry's taught me that articulation here is critical. Henry, testing. It can mean this,

it can mean that. Please help me remember. Well, there are non-critical tests where you

make sure that everything but the fissile material in plutonium or highly rich uranium

doesn't begin to fission to produce a perceptible explosion. You know, maybe a pound or two of yield.

That's non-critical testing.

And what you're doing there is making sure that the high explosive hasn't deteriorated,

HDX or RDX or whatever you're using.

You're checking to see that the wiring hasn't, you know, eroded and oxidized and corroded, that it's functional.

And that allows you to do maintenance of your fleet, if you will, of weapons.

Stockpile stewardship does not require having a full yield explosion.

If you want to know what the precise yield will be and what the reliability of

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